How can people benefit when in the free market system consumers are seen as a resource to be exploited?
For example, how long do you think McDonald's would last if its McBurgers tasted bad? McDonald's success is extremely tied to customer satisfaction.
Tossing the ball back to you, under socialism, why would the socialist service care if you're pleased with the service or not?
Every country that tried having the government run food production produced starvation.
Every one.
> The goal of the capitalist isn't to make their customer happy, its to extract as much of their available disposable income as possible.
True, but the way to get that money is to please the customer, because the company cannot force them to buy.
Plus your quip is a little bit dated honestly. The soviets had famines because they literally didn't support evolution for quite some time. They believed Lysenko and allowed him to execute his critics. Meanwhile today, look at China the past few decades when modern agricultural practices were finally well established around the world. Another 600 million people in 50 years. Huge population growth doesn't happen because of starvation.
Ah, the arrogance of knowing what is best for others. (Of course, I know what's best for everyone else, too, but my arrogance stops at taking the next step of being entitled to force it on them.)
> The soviets
You can make excuses for the Soviets. But you gotta explain the starvation from every other communist country. The starvation in Jamestown when they tried communist agriculture. The starvation in the Pilgrims' first year when they tried communist food production. The failure of the Kibbutzen in Israel to feed themselves without government subsidy.
It goes on and on.
P.S. China stopped starving when the stopped collectivist agriculture.
Now for the flip side. Which was the first country to eliminate famine? The US, around 1800, with free market agriculture. Next, which free market agricultural system has suffered from a famine?
Those goalposts were just fine where they were, put them back and address the actual argument. Nobody was advocating for 'government run food production'.
That's why it's the poster boy for socialism's failures.
lol you misspelled "ran by corrupt authoritarian governments that don't give 2 shits about the public unless they can exploit them"
You can ding corporations... but the real world socialist examples are worse.
Corporations aren't perfect (and we don't live in pure capitalism anyways. Common sense controls exist for good reason). But they are better than socialist governments.
Industrial democracy, where workers own and control the company, backed by a robust welfare state, is socialism.
Besides, the US under free market agriculture produced the tallest people in the world up until WW2. It's kinda hard to believe that Americans grew that tall from eating garbage.
There’s a reason why Five Guys, etc are everywhere. People who want a good burger go there.
Capitalism, like democracy, is the worst form of government, except for all the others. To believe that the US brand of capitalism can do no wrong is to be as deluded as the communists were. If the free market were perfectly efficient, there would be no such thing as conmen or MLM scams, and every consumer would be 100% informed and perfectly rational. That's ridiculous, so the government needs to step in at times, to promote a freer market than one without regulation.
Go eat at a restaurant in Times Square. They exist only because of their location, and the fact that tourists don't stay long. So their food is bad AND they don't need to try and harder because it doesn't hurt their business. They're a total ripoff and a tourist trap and that's with capitalism's vaunted free market backing the enterprise.
> They're a total ripoff and a tourist trap and that's with capitalism's vaunted free market backing the enterprise.
If you think they're a ripoff, don't patronize them. Nobody is making you.
That seemed obvious to most observers, up to the Cold War.
It can't account for international trade, which functions on mutual self-interest.